Israel,
I did read your essay and went back and reviewed it. As you say, the situation is overwhelmingly complex when we start considering all the actual details. A big part of the reason why I like discussing physics, rather than history, politics, sociology, etc. The secret seems to be to find the patterns and processes within all those details. For one thing, we really are not looking for stability as an overall state. There has to be inherent ebb and flow. It is just when it gets out of the acceptable and manageable ranges and those vary, according to perspective. Otherwise stability eventually leads to stagnation and then disruption, as that stable state decays.
As for science and religion, they actually evolved as two sides of the same coin. When you go back to the ancients, it was a matter of both describing natural order and explaining it. This description became mathematics and science. Think cosmology. Meanwhile religion grew out of the entirely natural impulse to explain this order as intentional and assign personality to these natural forces. Beauty, anger, fear, ego, attraction eroticism etc. can all find, with a little imagination, parallels in the natural order of things. The premise of monotheism is essentially knowledge and wisdom as a form of platonic ideal. Given the inherent dynamic of intellectualism is to distill signals from the noise, this reductionism is a logical progression. Christianity is actually a bit of a step back, with the concept of the trinity, to the inescapable complexities. Essentially it is a personification of past/father, present/son and future/holy ghost, since it grew out of a schism in Judaism and so the son was projected as a renewal, but after suffering centuries of persecution, hope for the future became its selling point to those who where persecuted, which is a big audience.
Islam was actually a much more politically successful movement for its first seven hundred years (and largely coasted for the next six hundred), compared to Christianity and as such, was able to project a more monolithic vision and only in the last hundred years, have the downsides of this, in its lack of conceptual diversity and thus social inertia, come home to roost.
We are taught good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but they are in fact the biological binary code of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins. Between black and white are not only shades of grey, but all the other colors of the spectrum.
What might be good for the individual, expansion and reproduction, might be bad for the group, if it uses up all the resources, so like any computation, the factors are many. The fact is that reality is bottom up and we only see it top down from our particular limited point of view.
So analyzing religion really must be part of any full scale review of humanity and its options, since it functions as the core and vision of societies.
As for our immediate situation, I just wrote a comment on Don Limuti's entry, which I think lays out the immediate situation and where to go from here. I've given this topic a fair amount of thought over the years, but tend to have trouble finding forums willing to discuss it in real depth, so I don't get a lot of feedback. Since I submitted my entry with the very first batch, I have been getting enough feedback to think it through even more, so this comment reflects that slightly more complex view. I'll post it here anyway;
"Don,
A spot on and logically focused article. I've been castigating various entrants for their 'out in space' entries and so it is nice to have such a well centered and reasonable one. I think though, that the possibility exists to be far more radical than you might think possible. Significant change is only possible when the old order breaks down, but right now the current status quo is coalescing in upon itself and only re-enforcing its own increasingly disfunctional methods. So all the various sectors of society mostly seek to hold onto what they have and further antagonize other parts of society. In this situation, even your reasonable proposals would meet considerable resistance from those who are more focused on holding onto what they have, than gambling on a better outcome.
The result would normally be a state of slow stagnation and increasingly stratified and compartmentalized future society. Yet I think that the monumental nature of these issues provides a potential relief.
The enormous tumor of financial excess can only keep growing at this exponential rate and will blow up when it reaches some totally unsustainable level. The result will be the equivalent of a massive heart attack on society, as the economic circulation system siezes up. While this will be potentially catastrophic in some quarters, it is not as though monetary regimes haven't collapsed before and had forms of local exchange rise in their place.
My proposal is that we begin treating money as the contract which it is, rather than the commodity we have been led to believe it is. While this might seem a minor conceptual issue, it has the potential to change the paradigm by which society functions.
Any society above a few hundred people needs a medium of exchange. If there is not some readily available commodity with universal applications, such as gold, silver, salt, grain, etc. then a debt based monetary system is quite effective. Yet we forget it is essentially a form of public utility and social contract, not private property. We no more own those bills in our pockets, than we own the section of road we happen to be driving on, yet it is very much in the interest of those controlling this system for us to believe that it is personal property, much as it is in the fisherman's interest for the fish to think that worm belongs to it. This way, every aspect of exchange becomes denominated in this medium and everyone wants as much as possible, further empowering those controlling it.
Money functions like blood in the economy and as such it needs to keep flowing. Since everyone wishes to obtain as much as possible, this naturally creates excess. If we simply take it out of circulation and store it, it means more must be issued and then there becomes more than necessary, so that if the value started to go down, people would try dumping these stores, further decreasing the value.
Otherwise it must be invested, ie. loaned to someone else who can effectively spend it in ways to make even more and then pay off the debt and still earn enough to make the effort worthwhile. The fact is there are far fewer of these opportunities, then there is money seeking worthwhile investments.
This then leads to various unsustainable feedback loops, such as that once speculative investing, ie. greater fool systems, start, it can quickly become possible that money can be borrowed into existence cheaper than these bubbles grow and thus building on theselves, as is currently happening in much of the investment world
There is also the need to create ever more debt to feed the production of this capital and so lending standards fall. Not to mention the innumerable ways further leverage is added.
Now if people wish to gamble, this should be perfectly legal, with the understanding that it is gambling, not disguised as safe investment.
So in reality money is a form of debt. One person's asset is another person's obligation. When those with large piles of these surplus bills gain functional control over the government, then they can effectively have the government, ie. the public, buy this notational wealth as public debt and so sustain its value, since the public is required to pay it back, with interest. Then this money has to be spent and often it is in ways which further enrich those in control.
Now if we were to begin to understand that money functions as a necessary social contract and we don't actually own it, then most people will start to be far more careful how much they are willing to pull value out of personal and social relations, as well as environmental resources. This would then make the community and the environment natural stores of wealth, not just resources to be mined for value, in order to compete and gamble in the financial system.
Since stores of currency would be recognized as potentially unhealthy to the system, methods would be devised to reduce them. Most people store wealth for such needs as elder and youth care, education, housing and other large expenses. Now if we started storing value within our communities and relations, the normal, organic systems of exchange and reciprocity would emerge. We would start caring for the old folks and kids like nature intended, as part of life, not just services bought and sold. Much of primary education could also naturally fall into this system and more naturally integrated systems of secondary eduction might evolve as well. Then there could be forms of mutual building societies, much as the Amish do.
This is not to say a normal and extensive monetary, or even various overlapping monetary ststems wouldn't still function, but they would be built with full understandings of how they best function and for more liquid forms of exchange. Then local public banks would use their profits to fund services and projects within the communities that produced those profits. They would then serve as shareholders in regional systems, in a bottom up system.
Much as the body has both a heart and a head, society would naturally keep this function of circulation of wealth somewhat distinct from its public management, as a natural distribution and separation of power.
So this is how I think humanity should be steered; When this current financial system does break down, which seems imminent, but has been for a few decades, but they keep patching with ever more public debt and the resulting surplus credit, we simply have to open our eyes and understand this stuff called money is not, in and of itself, a form of commodity, but a contract which a community is making with its members and those caught abusing this system will naturally have their benefits penalized, not be allowed to profit from this abuse.
We need to educate people how it all works!!!!
Regards,
John Merryman
I
